This doesn't seem to take into account that professional athletes and musicians work very few hours in a year. Imagine if programmers were like NFL players, working for four 15-minute sessions, seventeen times a year.
I'm pretty sure they mean that NFL players (and musicians) have dedicated practice time separate from their "performance" time (games for athletes, concerts/recording/writing sessions/etc. for musicians), whereas software engineers are (generally) expected to produce useful output during all of their work time, and aren't generally allotted time in the schedule for self-improvement.
Same here. The only time I've seen a company schedule/budget for training was when I worked at Intel in the early 2000s. They were very serious about sending people for training classes in various technologies. After I left that company because of a big downturn, I never saw this kind of support for training at all.
Training is work but their main “events” are just much shorter than say that of a programmers. Even the longest athletic event like TdF lasts only several weeks. A programmer or lawyer worker 9 to 5 (at a minimum) doesn’t have time after work to practice.
Not writing code doesn't equate to not working. Thinking, documenting, designing, discussing, etc are all important parts of their job. I don't understand why you seem offended by my take on this. This line of reasoning doesn't by any means diminish athletes/musician's work.
Because the identical logic works when used on athletes and musicians. You're just being obtuse and refusing to recognize it. I don't know if you get off on feeling superior to people who aren't developers, but I think it's weird you're trying to argue this angle so hard.
In all these professions, and many more, we're expected to maintain a certain level of performance (or capacity for performance) whether we're officially given the time for it at work and whether we're paid for it or not.
I also don't see how you can possibly in good faith compare "public performance" to whatever you think the equivalent "performance" is as a developer.
It sounds disrespectful and unnecessary, honestly.
My main point is that these jobs are fundamentally different and people spend their time differently as a consequence.
At this point, I am more curious about how what I argue even comes across as me feeling superior or being disrespectful to people who aren't developers. (I am not a developer and would rather spent all my time running if I could)
Imagine if you told your boss you were only going to actually write code or investigate bugs from 1pm-5pm on Fridays, and the rest of the week you were going to practice "fundamentals". Your boss would think it completely ridiculous, but it's still a larger ratio of performance to practice / training than a professional musician or athlete.
The nature of the work is not the same, hence, the proportion of the modalities of your work are not identical.
The problem is considering that only your office boss work view is the one that qualifies as work.
The problem is also considering that a software engineer performance is in writing code/investigating bugs, whereas it is in the whole process/intellectual pursuit. In some cases, you will need to spend a whole week of going back to fundamentals or training or other, to be able to solve your issue in a few hours on Friday.
>The nature of the work is not the same, hence, the proportion of the modalities of your work are not identical.
I guess we solved that problem then. We're comparing apples to oranges and wondering why oranges don't have edible skin.
>The problem is considering that only your office boss work view is the one that qualifies as work.
So you're suggesting that more programmers should practice in their free time?
>The problem is also considering that a software engineer performance is in writing code/investigating bugs, whereas it is in the whole process/intellectual pursuit.
You can argue we're always performing or never performing in that case. Or perhaps our "performance" is crunch for a deadline, or right after a product shislps.
Either way, it's fundamentally different from practice/performance scheduling of athletes or musicians. Performance should be a place where you put 110% into an act, often in a burst. Physically or mentally, we can't afford to operate at 110% every day. That's why there's often a rest day for musicians/athletes. Knowledge workers is much more spotty.
Learning, training, practicing, teaching, rehearsing, performing are just several different modalities of (the) work, with distinct proportions depending on the job and the role(s).
It's not because one's not in a 9-5 office job that it's not work either.
Your plumber, or locksmith, or carpenter, or physician is also often performing for you only a few minutes/hours. You may think you're watching/paying for this performance only, but you're really watching all the experience that goes into this performance, that is the result of their previous studies, training, and practice and other performances.
The "difference" with a "typical" office job is that you don't get to have them in the single same place all the time, and watch/see them work through all those modalities, sanctioned by some manager. It's much more open than that.
What is amazing is how normalised the "controlling" factory/office work culture has become.
With how good WLB is for the intelligent in tech, many of them do perform at about that exact amount per year!
Seriously, this is the source of “rest and vest” as a mentality and why some companies, I.e Microsoft, are seen as tech retirement homes. They hire the brilliant lazy.
Yes, there really are a lot of FAANG caliber engineers who don’t work much harder than you described. Yes really.
I don't think it is. A NFL player is hired to perform well for just a few hours a year, the rest doesn't matter. A live musician needs to play well during the few hours of concert they have each year, what they do when the public is not there doesn't matter.
It means all of their job is concentrated in a few hours per year, so they have to be damn good at it. In order to do that, they need training, which is most of their working time. For most other jobs, there is much less time to train, and it doesn't matter as much because what counts is the average performance, not just a few key moments.
For programming, the parallel would be competitive programming. A competitive programmer will spend days studying algorithms like no one else, because it will matter for the hour or two of the competition. For typical programmers the loss of productivity for not knowing the algorithms is less than the time spent studying them.
I think it was confusing people because pro sports players are often paid by an org or team that will fire them if they don't show up for the endless hours of training. They also get huge amounts of resources to make that training more effective.
Versus, say, a touring rock band that gets a cut of the performance revenue. I don't think there's anyone paying them a multi-year contract salary.
saying training is work is also confusing, because just doing your work is not training either. I'm kinda angry at the school system for never teaching me about dedicated practice. For the longest time, I did believe practicing something was just doing it over and over.
I'm having a lot of trouble understanding your definition of work. Even if you meant perform- most athletes have to perform continuously outside out of games in order to earn minutes in game. And touring musicians are performing way more hours than you cite.
Imagine if programmers were like NFL players, constantly measured on their performance against their peers.